Wednesday, 28 September 2011

Surely There’s Another, Bigger Mystery Here?

A French farmer who bound an elderly German woman to a ladder before sawing off her limbs while she was still alive has been sentenced to life in prison.

The details that the ‘Mail’ gleefully highlights make depressing reading:

On the day of the murder, she was walking from her home to meet her husband for lunch when she entered onto Bureau's land.

However when she failed to appear he raised the alarm.

Detectives established that Bureau had intercepted her and dragged her into a barn at his farm.

Despite her pleas, he attached her arms and legs to a ladder leaning against a wall next to an old tractor and began by cutting off her fingers one by one .

Using butcher’s knives and a meat cleaver Bureau then cut off her arms and legs.

Bureau later revealed under questioning that the victim was still alive when the defendant beheaded her with the cleaver.

Bureau then put Edith Muhr’s body parts in bags and dumped them in a nearby pond but later recovered them and left them in a field.

Good grief!

And there’s no clear motive:

In a bid to establish Bureau’s motive for killing Edith Muhr, prosecutor Jean-Luc Gadaud told the court: ‘She was everything that he was not- wealthy,intelligent and liked. He was crippled by his indebtedness, shyness and his boring life.

‘She may have crossed his land. It was his territory and he wanted to show that he was the master of his land.

‘She was German. Perhaps it was a symbolic act of vengeance. His father was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944.’

Yeah, I rather think you’re reaching a bit there…

He sentenced him to life imprisonment and told him he would serve at least 20 years.

Bureau himself has so (far) refused to speak about his reasons for torturing and killing Edith Muhr.

The bigger mystery is surely this: This can’t have been his first and only crime of this nature. Can it?

15 comments:

Near where I lived when I was a kid a farmer had put up a sign saying "Trespassers will be mutilated" - we were that young we didn't know what mutilated meant at first. Nor did I know until now that the farmer might not have been joking after all!

I stopped watching Criminal Minds. CSI and NCIS and that sort of thing are fine, because it's such obvious fantasy, but there really are people out there who are sadistic, evil psychopaths. It's the same reason I have never seen any of the Saw movies, nor will I ever. I cannot imagine the agony this woman went through or, perhaps worse, the agony her husband must continue to endure.

I seem to recall that this horrile crime happened too few kilometers from where I live, ma famme et moi were at some freinds that evening and wondered why the helicopters were circling at night with searchlights. I may be wrong of course about the location but even though Mouleydier a local village was raised to the ground by the Whermacht in 1945 ( not by the 2nd ss division Das Reich in their northward march to Normandy in 1944 ) and memories are long indeed and I have met people who as children remember it burning, the crime was universally reviled by the locals.

Mouleydier was indeed burned down but in 1944 (I suspect a typo on the date by JohnnyRVF as the Wehrmacht, for all their technology, didn't have a Tardis to get them to Normandy a year earlier than their passage through the Bergeracois).

Hi Captain, yes indeed it was Oradour sur Glane that was the site of the massacre by the SS. According to the detailed history by Max Hastings it was young soldiers from the 1st SS division Das Hitler that were responsible under orders from a division Major to kill every village member in retaliation to another Major being abducted and executed by a communist faction of the Resistance. In fact the Germans made a terrible mistake because apparently the Resistance members came from a small village called Oradour but this was mistaken as Oradour sur Glane, again I have met people who still despair at the attitude of the young French Alsace Lorraine recruits who actually did the killing that they could not disobey an order in the german army despite the fact they were murdering their own countrymen and women.Mouleydier was targeted by the retreating Wermacht, in this part of France there was a very large resistance presence and they severly tested the patience of the German forces, resulting in revenge attacks such as this because there were no allied forces this far south to retaliate, however these incidents were not isolated to and in France and certainly not in Russia.

If there's any comfort to be had from the massacre at Oradour sur-Glane it's that the Das Reich 2 SS Panzer Division was essentially wiped out in the Battle of Normandy. Knowing what I know now, I'd have had every captured SS man shot out of hand. There's certainly stories that Allied soldiers on the Western Front were reluctant to accept surrender from enemy units if the Allies knew they were SS.

But, but this Frog version of Leatherface needs to be fed, very slowly, and with exquisite attention to detail, into a wood-chipper.

" Nor did I know until now that the farmer might not have been joking after all!"

Good job you never trespassed then!

"... because it's such obvious fantasy, but there really are people out there who are sadistic, evil psychopaths."

Clearly, more than we thought.

"I have met people who still despair at the attitude of the young French Alsace Lorraine recruits who actually did the killing that they could not disobey an order in the german army despite the fact they were murdering their own countrymen and women."

Mick, the date of 1945 comes from people who as children witnessed the flames from the otherside of the river. The journey of the SS division from Montauban where they had been based after their withdrawal from the Russian front to the battle ground of Normandy is well documented by Max Hastings, but it was NOT the SS who burnt down Mouleydier, at least not according to locals. The SS had a difficult journry because the rail cars which were capable of transporting the heavy battle equipment had been very thoroughly sabotaged by French rail enginners and so the Germans travelled north on the Nationale 20, in his book Max Hastings recounts tales from the German mechanics of the interminable delays caused by the frequent breakdowns of the tanks as they were never designed for large distance road travel. I may of course be incorrect in the year, but I am recounting what I have been told by a very good freinds father who was about 8 years old at the end of the war.